Palin's Show-Stopper Boosts GOP Hopes

Like the Democrats in Denver, the Republicans in Minnesota opted on their
penultimate convention night to feature glimpses of some of their leading
lights.

The Democrats had been able to offer star turns from a former president, Bill
Clinton, and from their previous nominee for the White House, John Kerry. Given
that the former was constitutionally prohibited from running again and it was
impossible to imagine a groundswell in favor of the latter hazarding another
try, the party's future had been spoken to by a relatively bland bench --
Senators Birch Bayh, Jack Reed, and other discarded vice-presidential
prospects.

Then had come vice-presidential Joe Biden, a new face to the public,
perhaps, but an old warhorse familiar to he mainstream media. Not a bad show,
all in all, but nothing unexpected.

On Wednesday night at the Xcel Energy Center, the Republicans had ponied up
their three leading runners-up for the big prize itself - in sequence, Mitt
Romney, Mike Huckabee, and Rudy Giuliani. All managed to rouse a crowd that
clearly came ready to be roused -- Romney with familiar nostrums dividing the
world of political possibility between liberal solutions (bad) and conservative
ones (good), Huckabee with the same hint of compassion and road-straddling
policies that had made him a surprise contender at the beginning of the year,
and Giuliani with a flurry of rhetorical punches (some of them arguably
below-the-belt) and the wicked grin of somebody with nothing to lose and
determined to have fun.

Again, nothing unexpected, but a presentable show.

But the last act was something else. It is one thing to come upon a stage
like an impressive unknown and perform well enough at a recital to draw
enthusiastic applause. It is quite another to come out of nowhere (not one of
ten thousand seasoned political junkies had ever heard of Sarah Palin before
last week when GOP standard-bearer John McCain pulled her out of the hat) and
come on like Pavarotti.

Let's put it this way: When MSNBC's Keith Olbermann, the acerbic,
silver-tongued spokesman for all things liberal and Democratic, begins his
post-speech commentary on a Republican speaker with this sentence, "It was
clearly a great speech," you have just seen a genuine show-stopper.

Much of the advance conversation, not only from journalists covering the
convention but from the delegates and alternates themselves, went like this: If
she blows it, McCain is done for; if she does well, he has a chance to look good
and maintain his hopes.

Palin did neither of the above. Drawing perhaps on her past service as a TV
sportscaster, the former small-town mayor and current Alaska governor delivered
a genuine stunner of a speech. In her confident bearing, in her jaunty delivery,
in her faultless timing, Palin transcended the occasional bromides of her text
(a goodly portion of which was written by McCain's staff) and presented to a
curious nation a persona to reckon with.

Her speech, like those of her previously mentioned podium precursors, was in the
attack mode and was sprinkled with zingers, like this one:

And though both Senator Obama and Senator Biden have been going on
lately about how they are always, quote, "fighting for you," let us face the
matter squarely. There is only one man in this election who has ever really
fought for you ... in places where winning means survival and defeat means death
... and that man is John McCain.

It was blunt and hard, an unexpected rabbit punch, coming from a PTA-looking
lady clad not in a pantsuit like the Democratic star whom she vaguely echoed but
in plain-Jane attire and short skirt unabashedly flashing some leg.
"Hockey-mom," she called herself, but there was something of the bowling-team
member about her, so that the lines quoted above had an Everyman quality to
them.

Or should we say "Everywoman." For that phrase "only one man" highlighted
her uniqueness in this quartet of major-party finalists whom the nation must
judge. She was suddenly not only the modern female rising to power but the
ancient one as well, choosing between the rival males about her on the basis of
their sensed qualities.

Building up McCain had been one of her tasks, and she did that admirably.
Presenting a rationale for her own governance had been another, and that, too,
Palin accomplished, with recollections from her brief professional life and the
rudiments of a reform plan. Finally, there was the matter of her problem family,
an issue which Palin hit head on by trotting out on stage the whole kit and
caboodle of them, ex-DUI hubby, pregnant unwed daughter, and all.

Sarah Palin still has much to prove. Her resume is scantness itself, and
she'll still have a lot of 'splaining to do on almost all matters, from the
commander-in-chief level on down to matters of policy-execution. But as
auditions go, it was a hell of a good show.

The audience in the Xcel Center loved it. If the audience at home did, as well,
and if presidential nominee McCain can hold up his end on Thursday night, the
Republican team has a chance of coming out of this convention with a modest lead
in the polls.